Arts & Events

The Judah L. Magnes Museum will ask the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission today (Thursday) to approve a structural alteration permit to rehabilitate the landmarked Armstrong University in downtown Berkeley, where it plans to relocate in spring 2010.
-more-

Virago Theatre Company has announced a July and early August series of staged readings of new plays by Bay Area playwrights, featuring professional actors, on Monday evenings at 7 p.m. in Alameda, featuring venues that include a cafe, a drawing studio and community centers, with some readings staged outdoors, followed by wine and talk-back receptions.
-more-

With a musical comedy based on Shakespeare gone south, lyrics and score by Cole Porter, topical humor of the postwar (WW II) era popping up amid the iambs and a couple of gangsters thrown in when the male ingenue goes bust at craps: how could Kiss Me Kate miss?
-more-

Far from the ragged, blurry, jumpy images in the popular imagination, the silent era of filmmaking was an age of discovery, innovation and supreme achievement in the new medium of cinema. Motion pictures, at first treated as a mere novelty, came into their own between 1910 and 1920, growing from brief, flickering diversions into full-scale narratives. But it was in the 1920s that cinema truly blossomed into the great art form of the 20th century.
-more-

California is burning down. This is the real Shock and Awe. As of this writing, there are over 1,300 fires burning in the state and nearly a third of a million acres have burned. Since I’m not good with acres, I decided to convert this to square miles. At 640 acres to a square mile, this means that close to 500 square miles have burned. Again, I’m not that good with areas so I like to find something to compare this with. The city of Los Angeles is about 500 square miles. San Francisco is less than half that size. Imagine, two San Franciscos have completely burned down in this recent spate of fires. We’ve currently got over 17,000 fire personnel working on fighting these fires, over a thousand engines in the field, three hundred bull dozers cutting fire breaks and 85 helicopters (mostly dropping water on these many blazes).
-more-